Small Business of the Year Runner-up: Garris Grading and Paving Inc. By the time Angela Alvarez Garris decided to build up an asphalt plant, she was fed up with people who refused to belive a woman could own and operate such a ostensibly manly business.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts recommended The Ryland Group Inc.’s stock this summer in part because of the Westlake Village, Calif.-based homebuilder’s presence in Charlotte, which the New York-based investment banking firm deems one of the best housing markets in the nation.

After Superstorm Sandy hit, Bostic-based Defiant Marine Inc. — a marine salvage company Ferris founded in 2010 — sent a crew to New York City to pump out the Montague Tube, which carries the subway under the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn

SunEnergy 1 LLC, a Mooresville-based solar-panel installer, has taken advantage of the spike in solar-energy tax breaks, with contracts jumping from about $50 million last year to an estimated $130 million in 2012.

Small Business of the Year Runner-up: In 2008 and 2009, Marvin Mercer scrapped for clients, calling on everyone he knew. Once, he heard two strangers talking about engineering in a restaurant, so he just walked up to the table and laid down his card. Nothing seemed to make a difference. Money was so tight that he and his wife, Wendy, who together own Mercer Design Group PC, were scrimping on paper and ink, and he had taken to nagging employees about turning out the lights. They even considered filing for bankruptcy. “We were probably within a week or two weeks of closing the doors,” he says.

When Julian Clayton was a kid, the family computer was so heavy and bulky that the only place to put it was the granite countertop of a bar in the basement. Now his Salisbury-based company Crescent Construction Services LLC relies on a device that weighs less than 2 pounds.

Around midnight, the spring sky spawned a twister that tore through Belmont, a small town just across the Catawba River from Charlotte. It ripped an 82,000-square-foot warehouse in half, strewing structural steel and sheets of siding like shrapnel and soaking the ruins in rain.

In downtown Charlotte, the $195 million NASCAR Hall of Fame’s swooping lines evoke speeding race cars, while three hours to the west in the Smoky Mountains, the Cherokee Central Schools complex — 10 buildings, including three schools — is an earth-toned $108 million project blended into its natural surroundings.

In plain talk, a pyrrhic victory means: “We burned down the house, but at least we got rid of the cockroaches.” That might apply to builders and developers whose lawsuit caused the state Court of Appeals to overturn Union County’s impact fee on new homes.

In good times, Doug Allen’s company needed to beat only two or three other contractors to win an industrial construction project. But when Asheboro-based J.H. Allen Inc. recently went after a job in Eden, it was one of 60 companies looking for work.

On Sept. 17, 2007, a for-sale sign was jammed into the front yard of my home, which I had bought just 2 1/2 years prior (which is to say, near the peak of the housing market). Thus began my education in real estate.

Growing up in Winston-Salem, Darrell Westmoreland spent a lot of time working on his grandfather’s farm. As an Eagle Scout, he built hiking trails and went on frequent camping trips. “I was taught the importance of the environment and that you should take care of the land.”

North Carolina’s society has become multicultural, its economy has become more diverse, and the state has prospered in recent decades. But leaders must adjust their policies for a more metropolitan economy — focused on cities and suburbs — and address a widening disparity between rich and poor, says Ferrel Guillory, director of The Program on Public Life at UNC Chapel Hill.

Needless to say,” Charles Flowers e-mailed me, “this is a troubling letter.” He was referring to one that Will Sears, a Boone real-estate broker, had written about the cover story in our August issue on Bobby Ginn and Laurelmor, the mammoth residential and golf resort in Wilkes and Watauga counties.

Soleil means sun in French. And the Soleil Center hotel-condo tower proposed for northwest Raleigh would reach closer to it than any of its immediate neighbors. When finished, it will be the city’s tallest building — 43 stories and 480 feet. But right now, Soleil Center is stuck in the soil near Crabtree Valley Mall. Foundations have been laid, according to a statement by the developer, Soleil Group Inc., but the company is restructuring financing before going vertical. Soleil Group co-owner Sanjay Mundra didn’t return phone calls.

Bobby Ginn’s Laurelmor project is struggling financially, but he has one thing in his favor. The real-estate market is so bad that lenders aren’t eager to foreclose — even on the high-dollar acreage of western North Carolina’s largest residential development.

Barrett Freeman steers a Toyota Tundra up the side of a mountain east of Boone and Blowing Rock, crunching along a steep gravel road whose sides are shored against erosion. This is the resort development of Laurelmor, and the terrain underscores its wildness and size.

Outside, Charlotte is coming to life. Back home from a nearby YMCA and showered, a muscular man with a shaved head buttons his starched shirt and loops a striped tie under its collar. Four floors down the elevator and out on the street, he walks half a block, then waits in an open-sided shelter. A recorded voice breaks the stillness: “Train approaching.”

Jack Cecil says Biltmore Park, about 1.1 million square feet of condos, town houses, apartments, offices and stores a rock skip from the French Broad River, is his company’s first venture in New Urbanism “unless you want to go back in family history.”

Pat Riley built houses while working his way through high school and college in Pennsylvania. In the last 17 years, he played a major role in building North Carolina’s largest privately owned residential real-estate company.

Despite some winter rain, North Carolina is still mighty dry. In mid-January, more than half the population was subject to mandatory water restrictions. An additional 25% was under voluntary restrictions. How has the drought affected the state economy?

Frank Harmon draws with his ears. The Raleigh architect approaches his projects almost like a journalist, interviewing his clients repeatedly to understand what they need and, just as important, what they want.

To Pat Rodgers’ way of thinking, construction is a simple business. You do what you say you’re going to do, do it on time and stand behind your work. She has hammered those planks into a more than $350 million-a-year business.

For a quarter-century, each July University of Florida Foundation officials have packed up orange and blue banners, balloons, Gator cups and other UF paraphernalia and driven eight hours to throw a party at the favorite summer getaway spot of some of the university’s most generous donors: western North Carolina.

n 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that moving garbage constitutes commerce. As a result, New Jersey couldn't prohibit Philadelphia from trucking trash across the Delaware River into the Garden State. Nearly three decades later, North Carolina’s political leaders decided that they didn’t want this state to become New Jersey’s, or any other state’s, dumping ground.

Jim Rogers made more than $3 million in salary and bonus as chief executive of Cinergy Corp. in 2005, the year before the Cincinnati-based electric utility merged with Charlotte-based Duke Energy Corp. When he agreed to work for stock and options as Duke’s CEO last year, it made a good impression on shareholders but not his wife. “I can’t honestly say there wasn’t a comment from the other part of my team,” he admits.

It was February, when trees are bare and secrets hard to hide. Not that Jackson County has many. Though strangers keep pouring in — its population has grown by more than a third since 1990 — it still has only 36,000 residents, so it didn’t take long for rumors of a protest to reach Sheriff Jimmy Ashe.

During the Depression, conductors on the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina — wags called it the “eat taters and wear no clothes” — sometimes let locals ride free if they couldn’t pay the fare between Boone and Johnson City, Tenn.

You couldn’t blame Earl Johnson Jr. for sticking with the plan at RTI International. It generated $546.3 million in revenue for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, up 16.8% from the previous year. He’s been on the nonprofit research organization’s board since 1972 and its chairman — just its second — since 1993.

Even in good times, life in the construction industry can seem like a nerve-racking creep along an I-beam several stories high. When work is easy to find, prices for building supplies go up and labor gets harder to find and keep. But having too much business is better than the alternative.

First job I can remember was working in the cafeteria at Forest Hills School in Wilmington circa 1944. Pay was free lunch. There were about three or four other children working in the cafeteria. In hindsight, I realize that some of them had to work for lunch, whereas I did not. Years later, I met a Wake Forest professor and former football player a few years older than I am who told me about an incident. Some parents objected to white kids — schools being all-white or all-black back then — from Seagate, a poor rural area, being bused to Forest Hills School and were successful in getting attendance districts rearranged to exclude them. I was oblivious to the social tensions. Perhaps my job in the cafeteria kept me closer to the kids that had to work for something to eat and away from some of the kids whose parents were such insufferable snobs. If that is the case, I hope it had a positive influence on my value system and how I interact with people.

Metal buildings line Gribble Road in Matthews, east of Charlotte, housing a private garbage-collection service, car repair shops and other businesses. In one, Kevin Schoolcraft pushes through a door from offices into a shop that covers a quarter of an acre. It is filled with the smell of wood — Brazilian cherry, walnut, white oak — and the whine of saws.

Real estate is Chris Smith’s area of expertise. He’s president of Charlotte-based Allegiance Realty Corp., which owns about 2.1 million square feet of office space and 1,700 hotel rooms around the U.S.

It might seem hard to believe as you’re glancing through the real-estate listings, but houses in much of the state are priced about right, says a national study by Global Insight Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based economic forecaster, and National City Corp., a Cleveland-based bank.

Terry Stevens gathers reference books and a few family photographs for an elevator trip from the sixth floor to the fourth. Perhaps a dozen employees of Raleigh-based Highwoods Properties Inc. will join him there. They’ve got a lot of work ahead. Eleven-hour days, probably. For the next few months — what remains of 2005 — Highwoods has dibs on one day each weekend.

From his sixth-floor office in the Masonic Temple Building, Greg Hatem has a front-row seat for downtown Raleigh’s makeover. It’s a change that Hatem, 46, helped start 11 years ago when his Empire Properties LLC bought and renovated an empty warehouse nearby.

Long, long ago — at least in cybertime — there was the dot-com boom. Five years after it went bust, its echo is producing the ultimate handyman’s dream. It’s 23,000 square feet, and the two-lane bowling alley is nice on days when the tennis court is damp.

David A. Spetrino Jr. always liked to build things. As a kid, it was tree forts in his Dumfries, Va., backyard. When he finished one, he would tear it down and try a new design. In high school, he was a carpenter’s helper in nearby Dale City, framing houses. While attending Radford University, he shifted gears and got a real-estate license. Even then, he bought and renovated houses for rentals, and during summers, he would build barns.

Be careful what you wish for: You might get it. North Carolina contractors have been hoping for more private work for the past three years but instead had to settle for lower-margin public projects. Now private-sector work is back: Retail and multifamily residential building are booming, and even speculative office projects have begun to stir.

The office manager had come back from lunch, so the visitor got up and closed the door. What Sam Helms had to say was private, but Tommy Vaughan wouldn’t keep it that way. He claims Helms offered to pay his Ahoskie company not to work on a $94 million prison project near Tabor City.

Kevin Archer and his wife, Leslie, had looked at five or six condominium sites in downtown Charlotte when they rode the elevator to the top floor of a 13-story building one Sunday in January. The Archers were planning to move to the Queen City from Hickory, but they hadn’t seen anything they wanted to buy.

For two years, commercial builders leaned heavily on publicly funded projects to survive. But an improving economy stimulated a rebound in the private sector last year. “There’s just not much bad news out there,” says Tony Plath, a UNC Charlotte banking professor and consultant to the Carolinas Associated General Contractors.

In a conference room at his company’s headquarters, a gray-haired man whose 59-year-old physique is beginning to assume the contours of a pear fishes in his pocket for a crumpled Burger King receipt. He points with pride to the senior-citizen discount on his lunch. “I was glad to get that 47 cents.”

Most Charlotteans who live around Quail Hollow Country Club know their Saks from a hole in the ground. In a tale with twists befitting a store that once hoped to sell them $2,000 Louis Vuitton handbags, they thought they were getting the former. They got the latter instead.